WfrMs- 


University  of  California  •  Berkeley 


f  •> 


THE  COUNTRY  PRINTER 


Reprinted  for  private  distribution  only 
by  The  Plimpton  Press  for  its  friends 
through  the  courteous  permission  of 
Harper  $  Brothers  and  the  Author 

LIMITED    TO    FOUR    HUNDRED    COPIES 


THE   COUNTRY  PRINTER 


AN  ESSAY  BY 
WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS 


PRIVATELY  PRINTED 


COPYRIGHT,    1896 
BY    WILLIAM    DEAN    HOWELLS 

All  rights  reserved 


THE  COUNTRY  PRINTER 


THE  COUNTRY  PRINTER 

• 

MY  earliest  memories,  or  those  which  I 
can  make  sure  are  not  the  sort  of  early 
hearsay  that  we  mistake  for  remem- 
brance later  in  life,  concern  a  country  newspaper, 
or,  rather,  a  country  printing-office.  The  office 
was  in  my  childish  consciousness  some  years  before 
the  paper  was;  the  compositors  rhythmically 
swaying  before  their  cases  of  type;  the  pressman 
flinging  himself  back  on  the  bar  that  made  the 
impression,  with  a  swirl  of  his  long  hair;  the  ap- 
prentice rolling  the  forms,  and  the  foreman  bend- 
ing over  the  imposing-stone  were  familiar  to  me 
when  I  could  not  grasp  the  notion  of  any  effect 
from  their  labors.  In  due  time  I  came  to  know 
all  about  it,  and  to  understand  that  these  activi- 
ties went  to  the  making  of  the  Whig  newspaper 
which  my  father  edited  to  the  confusion  of  the 
Locofocos,  and  in  the  especial  interest  of  Henry 
Clay;  I  myself  supported  this  leader  so  vigorously 
for  the  presidency  in  my  seventh  year  that  it  was 
long  before  I  could  realize  that  the  election  of 
1 844  had  resulted  in  his  defeat.  My  father  had 


4  THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER 

already  been  a  printer  for  a  good  many  years,  and 
sometime  in  the  early  thirties  he  had  led  a  literary 
forlorn-hope,  in  a  West- Virginian  town,  with  a 
monthly  magazine,  which  he  printed  himself  and 
edited  with  the  help  of  his  sister. 

As  long  as  he  remained  in  business  he  remained 
a  country  editor  and  a  country  printer;  he  began 
to  study  medicine  when  he  was  a  young  man,  but 
he  abandoned  it  for  the  calling  of  his  life  without 
regret,  and,  though  with  his  speculative  and  in- 
ventive temperament  he  was  tempted  to  experi- 
ment in  other  things,  I  do  not  think  he  would 
ever  have  lastingly  forsaken  his  newspaper  for 
them.  In  fact,  the  art  of  printing  was  in  our 
blood;  it  never  brought  us  great  honor  or  profit; 
and  we  were  always  planning  and  dreaming  to 
get  out  of  it,  or  get  it  out  of  us;  but  we  are  all  hi 
some  sort  bound  up  with  it  still.  To  me  it  is  now 
so  endeared  by  the  associations  of  childhood  that 
I  cannot  breathe  the  familiar  odor  of  types  and 
presses  without  emotion;  and  I  should  not  be  sur- 
prised if  I  found  myself  trying  to  cast  a  halo  of 
romance  about  the  old-fashioned  country  office  in 
what  I  shall  have  to  say  of  it  here. 

OUR  first  newspaper  was  published  in  south- 
western Ohio,  but  after  a  series  of  varying  fortunes, 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  5 

which  I  need  not  dwell  upon,  we  found  ourselves 
in  possession  of  an  office  hi  the  northeastern 
corner  of  the  state,  where  the  prevalent  political 
feeling  promised  a  prosperity  to  one  of  my  father's 
antislavery  opinions  which  he  had  never  yet 
enjoyed.  He  had  no  money,  but  in  those  days 
it  was  an  easy  matter  to  get  an  interest  in  a 
country  paper  on  credit,  and  we  all  went  gladly 
to  work  to  help  him  pay  for  the  share  that  he 
acquired  in  one  by  this  means.  An  office  which 
gave  a  fair  enough  living,  as  living  was  then, 
could  be  bought  for  twelve  or  fifteen  hundred 
dollars;  but  this  was  an  uncommonly  good  office, 
and  I  suppose  the  half  of  it  which  my  father  took 
was  worth  one  sum  or  the  other.  Afterward, 
within  a  few  months,  when  it  was  arranged  to 
remove  the  paper  from  the  village  where  it  had 
always  been  published  to  the  county-seat,  a 
sort  of  joint-stock  company  was  formed,  and  the 
value  of  his  moiety  increased  so  much,  nominally 
at  least,  that  he  was  nearly  ten  years  paying 
for  it.  By  this  time  I  was  long  out  of  the  story, 
but  at  the  beginning  I  was  very  vividly  in  it, 
and  before  the  world  began  to  call  me  with  that 
voice  which  the  heart  of  youth  cannot  resist, 
it  was  very  interesting;  I  felt  its  charm  then,  and 
now,  as  I  turn  back  to  it,  I  feel  its  charm  again, 


6  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

though  it  was  always  a  story  of  steady  work, 
if  not  hard  work. 

The  county-seat,  where  it  had  been  judged 
best  to  transfer  the  paper  lest  some  other  paper 
of  like  politics  should  be  established  there,  was  a 
village  of  only  six  or  seven  hundred  inhabitants. 
But,  as  the  United  States  senator  who  was  one 
of  its  citizens  used  to  say,  it  was  "a  place  of  great 
political  privileges."  The  dauntless  man  who 
represented  the  district  in  the  House  for  twenty 
years,  and  who  had  fought  the  antislavery  battle 
from  the  first,  was  his  fellow-villager  and  more 
than  compeer  in  distinction;  and,  besides  these, 
there  was  nearly  always  a  state  senator  or  repre- 
sentative among  us.  The  county  officers,  of 
course,  lived  at  the  county-seat,  and  the  leading 
lawyers,  who  were  the  leading  politicians,  made 
their  homes  in  the  shadow  of  the  court-house, 
where  one  of  them  was  presently  elected  to  pre- 
side as  judge  of  the  common  pleas.  In  politics, 
the  county  was  always  overwhelmingly  Free- 
soil,  as  the  forerunner  of  the  Republican  party 
was  then  called;  the  Whigs  had  hardly  gathered 
themselves  together  since  the  defeat  of  General 
Scott  for  the  presidency;  the  Democrats,  though 
dominant  in  state  and  nation,  and  faithful  to 
slavery  at  every  election,  did  not  greatly  out- 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  7 

number  among  us  the  zealots  called  Comeouters, 
who  would  not  vote  at  all  under  a  Constitution 
recognizing  the  right  of  men  to  own  men.  Our 
paper  was  Freesoil,  and  its  field  was  large  among 
that  vast  majority  of  the  people  who  believed 
that  slavery  would  finally  perish  if  kept  out  of 
the  territories  and  confined  to  the  old  Slave 
States.  With  the  removal  of  the  press  to  the 
county-seat  there  was  a  hope  that  this  field  could 
be  widened  till  every  Freesoil  voter  became  a 
subscriber.  It  did  not  fall  out  so;  even  of  those 
who  subscribed  in  the  ardor  of  their  political 
sympathies,  many  never  paid;  but  our  list  was 
nevertheless  handsomely  increased,  and  num- 
bered fifteen  or  sixteen  hundred.  I  do  not  know 
how  it  may  be  now,  but  then  most  country  papers 
had  a  list  of  four  or  five  hundred  subscribers;  a 
few  had  a  thousand,  a  very  few  twelve  hundred, 
and  these  were  fairly  decimated  by  delinquents. 
We  were  so  flown  with  hope  that  I  remember  there 
was  serious  talk  of  risking  the  loss  of  the  delin- 
quents on  our  list  by  exacting  payment  in  advance ; 
but  the  measure  was  thought  too  bold,  and  we 
compromised  by  demanding  two  dollars  a  year 
for  the  paper,  and  taking  a  dollar  and  a  half  if 
paid  in  advance.  Twenty-five  years  later  my 
brother,  who  had  followed  my  father  in  the  busi- 


8  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

ness,  discovered  that  a  man  who  never  meant  to 
pay  for  his  paper  would  as  lief  owe  two  dollars 
as  any  less  sum,  and  he  at  last  risked  the  loss  of 
the  delinquents  by  requiring  advance  payment; 
it  was  an  heroic  venture,  but  it  was  perhaps  time 
to  make  it. 

The  people  of  the  county  were  mostly  farmers, 
and  of  these  nearly  all  were  dairymen.  The  few 
manufactures  were  on  a  small  scale,  except 
perhaps  the  making  of  oars,  which  were  shipped 
all  over  the  world  from  the  heart  of  the  primeval 
forests  densely  wooding  the  vast  levels  of  the 
region.  The  portable  steam-sawmills  dropped 
down  on  the  borders  of  the  woods  have  long 
since  eaten  their  way  through  and  through  them, 
and  devoured  every  stick  of  timber  in  most 
places,  and  drunk  up  the  water-courses  that  the 
woods  once  kept  full;  but  at  that  time  half  the 
land  was  in  the  shadow  of  those  mighty  poplars 
and  hickories,  elms  and  chestnuts,  ashes  and 
hemlocks;  and  the  meadows  that  pastured  the 
herds  of  red  cattle  were  dotted  with  stumps  as 
thick  as  harvest  stubble.  Now  there  are  not 
even  stumps;  the  woods  are  gone,  and  the  water- 
courses are  torrents  in  spring  and  beds  of  dry 
clay  in  summer.  The  meadows  themselves  have 
vanished,  for  it  has  been  found  that  the  strong 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  Q 

yellow  soil  will  produce  more  in  grain  than  in 
milk.  There  is  more  money  in  the  hands  of  the 
farmers  there,  though  there  is  still  so  little  that 
by  any  city  scale  it  would  seem  comically  little, 
pathetically  little;  but  forty  years  ago  there  was 
so  much  less  that  fifty  dollars  seldom  passed 
through  a  farmer's  hands  in  a  year.  Payment 
was  made  in  kind  rather  than  in  coin,  and  every 
sort  of  farm  produce  was  legal  tender  at  the 
printing-office.  Wood  was  welcome  in  any  quan- 
tity, for  the  huge  box-stove  consumed  it  with 
inappeasable  voracity,  and  then  did  not  heat  the 
wide,  low  room  which  was  at  once  editorial- 
room,  composing-room,  and  press-room.  Perhaps 
this  was  not  so  much  the  fault  of  the  stove  as  of 
the  building.  In  that  cold,  lake-shore  country 
the  people  dwelt  in  wooden  structures  almost 
as  thin  and  flimsy  as  tents;  and  often  in  the  first 
winter  of  our  sojourn  the  type  froze  solid  with  the 
water  which  the  compositor  put  on  it  when  he 
wished  to  distribute  his  case;  the  inking-rollers 
had  to  be  thawed  before  they  could  be  used  on 
the  press;  and,  if  the  current  of  the  editor's  soul 
had  not  been  the  most  genial  that  ever  flowed  in 
this  rough  world,  it  must  have  been  congealed 
at  its  source.  The  cases  of  type  had  to  be  placed 
very  near  the  windows  so  as  to  get  all  the  light 


10  THE     COUNTRY    PRINTER 

there  was,  and  they  got  all  the  cold  there  was, 
too.  From  time  to  time  the  compositor's  fingers 
became  so  stiff  that  blowing  on  them  would  not 
avail;  he  passed  the  time  in  excursions  between 
his  stand  and  the  stove;  in  very  cold  weather 
he  practised  the  device  of  warming  his  whole 
case  of  types  by  the  fire,  and,  when  it  lost  heat, 
warming  it  again.  The  man  at  the  press-wheel 
was  then  the  enviable  man;  those  who  handled 
the  chill,  damp  sheets  of  paper  were  no  more 
fortunate  than  the  compositors. 

II 

iHE  first  floor  of  our  office-building  was  used 
by  a  sash-and-blind  factory;  there  was  a  machine- 
shop  somewhere  in  it,  and  a  mill  for  sawing  out 
shingles;  and  it  was  better  fitted  to  the  exercise 
of  these  robust  industries  than  to  the  requirements 
of  our  more  delicate  craft.  Later,  we  had  a  more 
comfortable  place,  in  a  new  wooden  "business 
block,"  and  for  several  years  before  I  left  it  the 
office  was  domiciled  in  an  old  dwelling-house, 
which  we  bought,  and  which  we  used  without 
much  change.  It  could  never  have  been  a  very 
luxurious  dwelling,  and  my  associations  with  it 
are  of  a  wintry  cold,  scarcely  less  polar  than  that 
we  were  inured  to  elsewhere.  In  fact,  the  climate 


THE     COUNTRY    PRINTER  II 

of  that  region  is  rough  and  fierce;  and  the  lake 
winds  have  a  malice  sharper  than  the  saltest 
gales  of  the  North  Shore  of  Massachusetts.  I 
know  that  there  were  lovely  summers  and  love- 
lier autumns  hi  my  time  there,  full  of  sunsets  of 
a  strange,  wild,  melancholy  splendor,  I  suppose 
from  some  atmospheric  influence  of  the  lake; 
but  I  think  chiefly  of  the  winters,  so  awful  to  us 
after  the  mild  seasons  of  southern  Ohio;  the 
frosts  of  ten  and  twenty  below;  the  village  streets 
and  the  country  roads  drowned  in  snow,  the 
consumptives  in  the  thin  houses,  and  the  "slip- 
pin',"  as  the  sleighing  was  called,  that  lasted  from 
December  to  April  with  hardly  a  break.  At 
first  our  family  was  housed  on  a  farm  a  little  way 
out,  because  there  was  no  tenement  to  be  had  in 
the  village,  and  my  father  and  I  used  to  walk  to 
and  from  the  office  together  in  the  morning  and 
evening.  I  had  taught  myself  to  read  Spanish, 
in  my  passion  for  Don  Quixote,  and  I  was  then, 
at  the  age  of  fifteen,  preparing  to  write  a  life  of 
Cervantes.  This  scheme  occupied  me  a  good 
deal  in  those  bleak  walks,  and  perhaps  it  was 
because  my  head  was  so  hot  with  it  that  my  feet 
were  always  very  cold;  but  my  father  assured 
me  that  they  would  get  warm  as  soon  as  my 
boots  froze.  If  I  have  never  yet  written  that  life 


12  THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER 

of  Cervantes,  on  the  other  hand  I  have  never 
been  quite  able  to  make  it  clear  to  myself  why  my 
feet  should  have  got  warm  when  my  boots  froze. 

Ill 

IT  may  have  been  only  a  theory  of  his;  it  may 
have  been  a  joke.  He  had  a  great  many  theories 
and  a  great  many  jokes,  and  together  these  always 
kept  life  interesting  and  sunshiny  to  him.  With 
his  serene  temperament  and  his  happy  doubt  of 
disaster  in  any  form,  he  was  singularly  well  fitted 
to  encounter  the  hardships  of  a  country  editor's 
lot.  But  for  the  moment,  and  for  what  now 
seems  a  long  time  after  the  removal  of  our  paper 
to  the  county-seat,  these  seem  to  have  vanished. 
The  printing-office  was  the  centre  of  civic  and 
social  interest;  it  was  frequented  by  visitors  at 
all  times,  and  on  publication  day  it  was  a  scene 
of  gayety  that  looks  a  little  incredible  in  the 
retrospect.  The  place  was  as  bare  and  rude  as 
a  printing-office  seems  always  to  be:  the  walls 
were  splotched  with  ink  and  the  floor  littered 
with  refuse  newspapers;  but  lured  by  the  novelty 
of  the  affair,  and  perhaps  attracted  by  a  natural 
curiosity  to  see  what  manner  of  strange  men  the 
printers  were,  the  school-girls  and  young  ladies 
of  the  village  flocked  in  and  made  it  like  a  scene 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  l3 

of  comic  opera,  with  their  pretty  dresses  and 
faces,  their  eager  chatter  and  lively  energy  in 
folding  the  papers  and  addressing  them  to  the 
subscribers,  while  our  fellow-citizens  of  the  place, 
like  the  bassos  and  barytones  and  tenors  of  the 
chorus,  stood  about  and  looked  on  with  faintly 
sarcastic  faces.  It  would  not  do  to  think  now 
of  what  sorrow  life  and  death  have  since 
wrought  for  all  those  happy  young  creatures, 
but  I  may  recall  without  too  much  pathos  the 
sensation  when  some  citizen  volunteer  relaxed 
from  his  gravity  far  enough  to  relieve  the 
regular  mercenary  at  the  crank  of  our  huge 
power-press  wheel,  amid  the  applause  of  the 
whole  company. 

We  were  very  vain  of  that  press,  which  replaced 
the  hand-press  hitherto  employed  in  printing 
the  paper.  This  was  of  the  style  and  make  of  the 
hand-press  which  superseded  the  Ramage  press 
of  Franklin's  time;  but  it  had  been  decided  to 
signalize  our  new  departure  by  the  purchase  of 
a  power-press  of  modern  contrivance  and  of  a 
speed  fitted  to  meet  the  demands  of  a  subscrip- 
tion-list which  might  be  indefinitely  extended. 
A  deputation  of  the  leading  politicians  accom- 
panied the  editor  to  New  York,  where  he  went  to 
choose  the  machine,  and  where  he  bought  a 


l  THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER 

second-hand  Adams  press  of  the  earliest  pattern 
and  patent.  I  do  not  know,  or  at  this  date  I 
would  not  undertake  to  say,  just  what  principle 
governed  his  selection  of  this  superannuated 
veteran;  it  seems  not  to  have  been  very  cheap; 
but  possibly  he  had  a  prescience  of  the  disa- 
bilities which  were  to  task  his  ingenuity  to  the 
very  last  days  of  that  press.  Certainly  no  man 
of  less  gift  and  skill  could  have  coped  with  its 
infirmities,  and  I  am  sure  that  he  thoroughly 
enjoyed  nursing  it  into  such  activity  as  carried 
it  hysterically  through  those  far-off  publication 
days.  It  had  obscure  functional  disorders  of 
various  kinds,  so  that  it  would  from  time  to  time 
cease  to  act,  and  would  have  to  be  doctored  by 
the  hour  before  it  would  go  on.  There  was 
probably  some  organic  trouble,  too,  for,  though 
it  did  not  really  fall  to  pieces  on  our  hands,  it 
showed  itself  incapable  of  profiting  by  several 
improvements  which  he  invented,  and  could, 
no  doubt,  have  successfully  applied  to  the  press 
if  its  constitution  had  not  been  undermined.  It 
went  with  a  crank  set  in  a  prodigious  fly-wheel 
which  revolved  at  a  great  rate,  till  it  came  to  the 
moment  of  making  the  impression,  when  the 
whole  mechanism  was  seized  with  such  a  reluc- 
tance as  nothing  but  an  heroic  effort  at  the  crank 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  l5 

could  overcome.  It  finally  made  so  great  a 
draught  upon  our  forces  that  it  was  decided  to 
substitute  steam  for  muscle  in  its  operation,  and 
we  got  a  small  engine  which  could  fully  sym- 
pathize with  the  press  in  having  seen  better 
days.  I  do  not  know  that  there  was  anything 
the  matter  with  the  engine  itself,  but  the  boiler 
had  some  peculiarities  which  might  well  mystify 
the  casual  spectator.  He  could  easily  have  sat- 
isfied himself  that  there  was  no  danger  of  its 
blowing  up  when  he  saw  my  brother  feeding 
bran  or  corn-meal  into  its  safety-valve  in  order 
to  fill  up  certain  seams  or  fissures  in  it  which 
caused  it  to  give  out  at  the  moments  of  the  great- 
est reluctance  in  the  press.  But  still  he  must 
have  had  his  misgivings  of  latent  danger  of  some 
other  kind,  though  nothing  ever  actually  hap- 
pened of  a  hurtful  character.  To  this  day  I  do 
not  know  just  where  those  seams  or  fissures  were, 
but  I  think  they  were  in  the  boiler-head,  and 
that  it  was  therefore  suffering  from  a  kind  of 
chronic  fracture  of  the  skull.  What  is  certain 
is  that,  somehow,  the  engine  and  the  press  did 
always  get  us  through  publication  day,  and  not 
only  with  safety,  but  often  with  credit;  so  that 
not  long  ago,  when  I  was  at  home,  and  my 
brother  and  I  were  looking  over  an  old  file  of 


l6  THE     COUNTRY    PRINTER 

his  paper,  we  found  it  much  better  printed  than 
either  of  us  expected;  as  well  printed,  in  fact,  as  if 
it  had  been  done  on  an  old  hand-press,  instead  of 
the  steam  power-press  which  it  vaunted  the  use 
of.  The  wonder  was  that,  under  all  the  dis- 
advantages, the  paper  was  ever  printed  on  our 
steam  power-press  at  all;  it  was  little  short  of 
miraculous  that  it  was  legibly  printed,  and  alto- 
gether unaccountable  that  such  impressions  as 
we  found  in  that  file  could  come  from  it.  Of 
course,  they  were  not  average  impressions;  they 
were  the  very  best  out  of  the  whole  edition,  and 
were  as  creditable  as  the  editorial  make-up  of 
the  sheet. 

IV 

ON  the  first  page  was  a  poem,  which  I  suppose  I 
must  have  selected,  and  then  a  story,  filling  all 
the  rest  of  the  page,  which  my  brother  more 
probably  chose;  for  he  had  a  decided  fancy  in 
fiction,  and  had  a  scrap-book  of  inexhaustible 
riches,  which  he  could  draw  upon  indefinitely  for 
old  personal  or  family  favorites.  The  next  page 
was  filled  with  selections  of  various  kinds,  and 
with  original  matter  interesting  to  farmers.  Then 
came  a  page  of  advertisements,  and  then  the  edi- 
torial page,  where  my  father  had  given  his  opinions 
of  the  political  questions  which  interested  him, 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  17 

and  which  he  thought  it  the  duty  of  the  country 
press  to  discuss,  with  sometimes  essays  in  the 
field  of  religion  and  morals.  There  was  a  letter 
of  two  columns  from  Washington,  contributed 
every  week  by  the  congressman  who  represented 
our  district;  and  there  was  a  letter  from  New 
York,  written  by  a  young  lady  of  the  county 
who  was  studying  art  under  a  master  of  portrai- 
ture then  flourishing  in  the  metropolis  —  if  that 
is  not  stating  it  too  largely  for  the  renown  of 
Thomas  Hicks,  as  we  see  it  in  a  vanishing  per- 
spective. The  rest  of  this  page,  as  well  as  the 
greater  part  of  the  next,  was  filled  with  general 
news  clipped  from  the  daily  papers  and  partly 
condensed  from  them.  There  was  also  such 
local  intelligence  as  offered  itself,  and  communica- 
tions on  the  affairs  of  village  and  county;  but  the 
editor  did  not  welcome  tidings  of  new  barns  and 
abnormal  vegetation,  or  flatter  hens  to  lay  eggs 
of  unusual  size  or  with  unusual  frequency  by 
undue  public  notice.  All  that  order  of  minute 
neighborhood  gossip  which  now  makes  the 
country  paper  a  sort  of  open  letter  was  then  un- 
known. He  published  marriages  and  deaths, 
and  such  obituary  notices  as  the  sorrowing 
fondness  of  friends  prompted  them  to  send  him; 
and  he  introduced  the  custom  of  publishing 


l8  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

births,  after  the  English  fashion,  which  the  people 
took  to  kindly. 

We  had  an  ambition,  even  so  remotely  as  that 
day,  in  the  direction  of  the  illustration  which 
has  since  so  flourished  in  the  newspapers.  Till 
then  we  had  never  gone  further  in  the  art  than 
to  print  a  jubilant  raccoon  over  the  news  of  some 
Whig  victory,  or,  what  was  to  the  same  purpose, 
an  inverted  cockerel  in  mockery  of  the  beaten 
Democrats;  but  now  we  rose  to  the  notion  of 
illustrated  journalism.  We  published  a  story 
with  a  woodcut  in  it,  and  we  watched  to  see  how 
that  cut  came  out  all  through  the  edition  with  a 
pride  that  was  perhaps  too  exhausive;  at  any 
rate,  we  never  tried  another. 

Of  course,  much  of  the  political  writing  in  the 
paper  was  controversial,  and  was  carried  on 
with  editors  of  other  opinions  elsewhere  in  the 
county,  for  we  had  no  rival  in  our  own  village. 
In  this,  which  has  always  been  the  vice  of  Amer- 
ican journalism,  the  country  press  was  then  fully 
as  provincial  as  the  great  metropolitan  journals 
are  now.  These  may  be  more  pitilessly  personal 
in  the  conduct  of  their  political  discussions,  and 
a  little  more  skilled  in  obloquy  and  insult;  but 
the  bickering  went  on  in  the  country  papers  quite 
as  idly  and  foolishly.  I  fancy  nobody  really 


THE     COUNTRY    PRINTER  IQ 

cared  for  our  quarrels,  and  that  those  who  fol- 
lowed them  were  disgusted  when  they  were  more 
than  merely  wearied. 

The  space  given  to  them  might  better  have 
been  given  even  to  original  poetry.  This  was 
sometimes  accepted,  but  was  not  invited;  though 
our  sixth  page  commonly  began  with  verse  of 
some  kind.  Then  came  more  prose  selections, 
but  never  at  any  time  accounts  of  murder  or 
violent  crimes,  which  the  editor  abominated  in 
themselves  and  believed  thoroughly  corrupting. 
Advertisements  of  various  kinds  filled  out  the 
sheet,  which  was  simple  and  quiet  in  typography, 
wholly  without  the  hand-bill  display  which  now 
renders  nearly  all  newspapers  repulsive  to  the 
eye.  I  am  rather  proud,  in  my  quality  of  printer, 
that  this  was  the  style  which  I  established;  and 
we  maintained  it  against  all  advertisers,  who 
then  as  now  wished  to  outshriek  one  another 
in  large  type  and  ugly  woodcuts. 

It  was  by  no  means  easy  to  hold  a  firm  hand 
with  the  "live  business  men"  of  our  village  and 
county,  who  came  out  twice  a  year  with  the  spring 
and  fall  announcements  of  their  fresh  stocks  of 
goods,  which  they  had  personally  visited  New 
York  to  lay  in;  but  one  of  the  moral  advantages 
of  an  enterprise  so  modest  as  ours  was  that  the 


20  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

counting-room  and  the  editorial-room  were  united 
under  the  same  head,  and  this  head  was  the 
editor's.  After  all,  I  think  we  lost  nothing  by 
the  bold  stand  we  made  in  behalf  of  good 
taste,  and,  at  any  rate,  we  risked  it  when  we 
had  not  the  courage  to  cut  off  our  delinquent 
subscribers. 

We  had  business  advertising  from  all  the  vil- 
lages in  the  county,  for  the  paper  had  a  large 
circle  of  readers  in  each,  and  a  certain  authority, 
in  virtue  of  representing  the  county-seat.  But 
a  great  deal  of  our  advertising  was  of  patent 
medicines,  as  the  advertising  still  is  in  the  country 
papers.  It  was  very  profitable,  and  so  was  the 
legal  advertising,  when  we  could  get  the  money 
for  it.  The  money  had  to  come  by  order  of 
court,  and  about  half  the  time  the  order  of  court 
failed  to  include  the  costs  of  advertising.  Then 
we  did  not  get  it,  and  we  never  got  it,  though  we 
were  always  glad  to  get  the  legal  advertising  on 
the  chance  of  getting  the  pay.  It  was  not  official, 
but  was  made  up  of  the  lawyers'  notices  to  de- 
fendants of  the  suits  brought  against  them.  If 
it  had  all  been  paid  for,  I  am  not  sure  that  we 
should  now  be  in  a  position  to  complain  of  the 
ingratitude  of  the  working-classes,  or  prepared 
to  discuss,  from  a  vantage  of  personal  experience, 


THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER  21 

the  duty  of  vast  wealth  to  the  community;  but 
still  we  should  have  been  better  off  for  that  money, 
as  well  as  the  money  we  lost  by  a  large  and  loyal 
list  of  delinquent  subscribers.  From  time  to 
time  there  were  stirring  appeals  to  these  ad- 
herents in  the  editorial  columns,  which  did  not 
stir  them,  and  again  the  most  flattering  offers  to 
take  any  kind  of  produce  in  payment  of  sub- 
scription. Sometimes  my  brother  boldly  tracked 
the  delinquents  to  their  lairs.  In  most  cases  I 
fancy  they  escaped  whatever  arts  he  used  to  take 
them;  many  died  peacefully  in  their  beds  after- 
ward, and  their  debts  follow  them  to  this  day. 
Still,  he  must  now  and  then  have  got  money  from 
them,  and  I  am  sure  he  did  get  different  kinds 
of  "trade."  Once,  I  remember,  he  brought 
back  in  the  tail  of  his  wagon  a  young  pig,  a  pig  so 
very  young  that  my  father  pronounced  it  "merely 
an  organization."  Whether  it  had  been  wrought 
to  frenzy  or  not  by  the  strange  experiences  of 
its  journey  I  cannot  say,  but  as  soon  as  it  was  set 
down  on  the  ground  it  began  to  run  madly,  and 
it  kept  on  running  till  it  fell  down  and  perished 
miserably.  It  had  been  taken  for  a  year's  sub- 
scription, and  it  was  quite  as  if  we  had  lost  a 
delinquent  subscriber. 


22  THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER 

V 

UPON  the  whole,  our  paper  was  an  attempt  at 
conscientious  and  self-respecting  journalism;  it 
addressed  itself  seriously  to  the  minds  of  its 
readers;  it  sought  to  form  their  tastes  and  opin- 
ions. I  do  not  know  how  much  it  influenced 
them,  if  it  influenced  them  at  all,  and  as  to  any 
effect  beyond  the  circle  of  its  subscribers,  that 
cannot  be  imagined,  even  in  a  fond  retrospect. 
But  since  no  good  effort  is  altogether  lost,  I  am 
sure  that  this  endeavor  must  have  had  some  tacit 
effect;  and  I  am  sure  that  no  one  got  harm  from 
a  sincerity  of  conviction  that  devoted  itself  to 
the  highest  interest  of  the  reader,  that  appealed 
to  nothing  base,  and  flattered  nothing  foolish 
in  him.  It  went  from  our  home  to  the  homes  of 
the  people  in  a  very  literal  sense,  for  my  father 
usually  brought  his  exchanges  from  the  office 
at  the  end  of  his  day  there,  and  made  his  selec- 
tions or  wrote  his  editorials  while  the  household 
work  went  on  around  him,  and  his  children 
gathered  about  the  same  lamp,  with  their  books 
or  their  jokes;  there  were  apt  to  be  a  good  many 
of  both. 

Our  county  was  the  most  characteristic  of 
that  remarkable  group  of  counties  in  northern 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  28 

Ohio  called  the  Western  Reserve,  and  forty 
years  ago  the  population  was  almost  purely 
New  England  in  origin,  either  by  direct  settle- 
ment from  Connecticut,  or  indirectly  after  the 
sojourn  of  a  generation  in  New  York  State. 
We  were  ourselves  from  southern  Ohio,  where  the 
life  was  then  strongly  tinged  by  the  adjoining 
life  of  Kentucky  and  Virginia,  and  we  found  these 
transplanted  Yankees  cold  and  blunt  in  their 
manners;  but  we  did  not  undervalue  their  virtues. 
They  formed  in  that  day  a  leaven  of  right  think- 
ing and  feeling  which  was  to  leaven  the  whole 
lump  of  the  otherwise  proslavery  or  indifferent 
state;  and  I  suppose  that  outside  of  the  anti- 
slavery  circles  of  Boston  there  was  nowhere  in 
the  country  a  population  so  resolute  and  so 
intelligent  in  its  political  opinions.  They  were 
very  radical  in  every  way,  and  hospitable  to 
novelty  of  all  kinds.  I  imagine  that  they  tested 
more  new  religions  and  new  patents  than  have 
been  even  heard  of  in  less  inquiring  communities. 
When  we  came  among  them  they  had  lately 
been  swept  by  the  fires  of  spiritualism,  which 
left  behind  a  great  deal  of  smoke  and  ashes  where 
the  inherited  New  England  orthodoxy  had  been. 
A  belief  in  the  saving  efficacy  of  spirit  phenomena 
still  exists  among  them,  but  not,  I  fancy,  at  all  in 


24  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

the  former  measure,  when  nearly  every  household 
had  its  medium,  and  the  tables  that  tipped  out- 
numbered the  tables  that  did  not  tip.  The  old 
New  York  Tribune,  which  was  circulated  in  the 
country  almost  as  widely  as  our  own  paper,  had 
deeply  schooled  the  people  in  the  economics  of 
Horace  Greeley,  and  they  were  ready  for  any 
sort  of  millennium,  religious  or  industrial,  that 
should  arrive,  while  they  looked  very  wisely  after 
the  main  chance  in  the  mean  time.  They  were 
temperate,  hard-working,  hard-thinking  folks, 
who  dwelt  on  their  scattered  farms,  and  came  up 
to  the  county  fair  once  a  year,  when  they  were 
apt  to  visit  the  printing-office  and  pay  for  their 
papers.  In  spite  of  the  English  superstition  to 
the  contrary,  the  average  American  is  not  very 
curious,  if  one  may  judge  from  his  reticence  in 
the  presence  of  things  strange  enough  to  excite 
question;  and  if  our  craft  surprised  these  wit- 
nesses they  rarely  confessed  it. 

They  thought  it  droll,  as  people  of  the  simpler 
occupations  are  apt  to  think  all  the  more  complex 
arts;  and  one  of  them  once  went  so  far  in  expres- 
sion of  his  humorous  conception  as  to  say,  after 
a  long  stare  at  one  of  the  compositors  dodging 
and  pecking  at  the  type  in  his  case,  "Like  an 
old  hen  pickin'  up  millet."  This  sort  of  silence, 


THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER  25 

and  this  sort  of  comment,  both  exasperated  the 
printers,  who  took  their  revenge  as  they  could. 
They  fed  it  full,  once,  when  a  country  subscriber's 
horse,  tied  before  the  office,  crossed  his  hind- 
legs  and  sat  down  in  his  harness  like  a  tired  man, 
and  they  proposed  to  go  out  and  offer  him  a 
chair,  to  take  him  a  glass  of  water,  and  ask  him 
to  come  inside.  But  fate  did  not  often  give  them 
such  innings;  they  mostly  had  to  create  their 
chances  of  reprisal,  but  they  did  not  mind  that. 

There  was  always  a  good  deal  of  talk  going  on, 
but,  although  we  were  very  ardent  politicians, 
the  talk  was  not  political.  When  it  was  not 
mere  banter,  it  was  mostly  literary;  we  disputed 
about  authors  among  ourselves  and  with  the  vil- 
lage wits  who  dropped  in.  There  were  several 
of  these  who  were  readers,  and  they  liked  to 
stand  with  their  backs  to  our  stove  and  challenge 
opinion  concerning  Holmes  and  Poe,  Irving  and 
Macaulay,  Pope  and  Byron,  Dickens  and 
Shakespeare. 

It  was  Shakespeare  who  was  oftenest  on  our 
tongues;  indeed,  the  printing-office  of  former 
days  had  so  much  affinity  with  the  theatre  that 
compositors  and  comedians  were  easily  con- 
vertible; and  I  have  seen  our  printers  engaged 
in  hand-to-hand  combats  with  column-rules,  two 


26  THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER 

up  and  two  down,  quite  like  the  real  bouts  on 
the  stage.  Religion  entered  a  good  deal  into 
our  discussions,  which  my  father,  the  most  tol- 
erant of  men,  would  not  suffer  to  become  irrev- 
erent, even  on  the  lips  of  law  students  bathing 
themselves  in  the  fiery  spirit  of  Tom  Paine.  He 
was  willing  to  meet  any  one  in  debate  of  moral, 
religious,  or  political  questions,  and  the  wildest- 
haired  Comeouters,  the  most  ruthless  sceptic,  the 
most  credulous  spiritualist,  found  him  ready  to 
take  them  seriously,  even  when  it  was  hard 
not  to  take  them  in  joke. 

It  was  part  of  his  duty,  as  publisher  of  the 
paper,  to  bear  patiently  with  another  kind  of 
frequenter  —  the  type  of  farmer  who  thought  he 
wished  to  discontinue  his  paper,  and  really 
wished  to  be  talked  into  continuing  it.  I  think 
he  rather  enjoyed  letting  the  subscriber  talk 
himself  out,  and  carrying  him  from  point  to  point 
in  his  argument,  always  consenting  that  he  knew 
best  what  he  wanted  to  do,  but  skilfully  per- 
suading him  at  last  that  a  home-paper  was  more 
suited  to  his  needs  than  any  city  substitute. 
Once  I  could  have  given  the  heads  of  his  reason- 
ing, but  they  are  gone  from  me  now.  The  editor 
was  especially  interested  in  the  farming  of  the 
region,  and  I  think  it  was  partly  owing  to  the 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  27 

attention  he  called  to  the  question  that  its  char- 
acter was  so  largely  changed.  It  is  still  a  dairy 
country,  but  now  it  exports  grain,  and  formerly 
the  farmers  had  to  buy  their  flour. 

He  did  not  neglect  any  real  local  interest  in 
his  purpose  of  keeping  his  readers  alive  to  matters 
of  more  general  importance,  but  he  was  fortunate 
in  addressing  himself  to  people  who  cared  for 
the  larger,  if  remoter,  themes  he  loved.  In 
fact,  as  long  as  slavery  remained  a  question  in 
our  politics,  they  had  a  seriousness  and  dignity 
which  the  present  generation  can  hardly  imagine; 
and  men  of  all  callings  felt  themselves  uplifted 
by  the  appeal  this  question  made  to  their  reason 
and  conscience.  My  father  constantly  taught  in 
his  paper  that  if  slavery  could  be  kept  out  of  the 
territories  it  would  perish,  and,  as  I  have  said,  this 
was  the  belief  of  the  vast  majority  of  his  readers. 
They  were  more  or  less  fervid  in  it,  according 
to  their  personal  temperaments;  some  of  them 
were  fierce  in  their  convictions  and  some  humor- 
ous, but  they  were  all  in  earnest.  The  editor 
sympathized  more  with  those  who  took  the  true 
faith  gayly.  All  were  agreed  that  the  Fugitive- 
slave  Law  was  to  be  violated  at  any  risk;  it 
would  not  have  been  possible  to  take  an  escaping 
slave  out  of  that  county  without  bloodshed,  but 


28  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

the  people  would  have  enjoyed  outwitting  his 
captors  more  than  destroying  them.  Even  in 
the  great  John  Brown  times,  when  it  was  known 
that  there  was  a  deposit  of  his  impracticable 
pikes  somewhere  in  our  woods,  and  he  and  his 
followers  came  and  went  among  us  on  some 
mysterious  business  of  insurrectionary  aim,  the 
affair  had  its  droll  aspects  which  none  appre- 
ciated more  keenly  than  the  Quaker-born  editor. 
With  his  cheerful  scepticism,  he  could  never  have 
believed  that  any  harm  or  danger  would  come  of 
it  all;  and  I  think  he  would  have  been  hardly 
surprised  to  wake  up  any  morning  and  find 
that  slavery  had  died  suddenly  during  the  night 
of  its  own  iniquity. 

He  was  like  all  country  editors  then,  and  I 
dare  say  now,  in  being  a  printer  as  well  as  an 
editor,  and  he  took  a  full  share  in  the  mechan- 
ical labors.  These  were  formerly  much  more 
burdensome,  for  twice  or  thrice  the  present  type- 
setting was  then  done  in  the  country  offices.  At 
the  present  day  the  country  printer  buys  of  a 
city  agency  his  paper  already  printed  on  one  side, 
and  he  gets  it  for  the  cost  of  the  blank  paper, 
the  agency  finding  its  account  in  the  advertise- 
ments it  puts  in.  Besides  this  patent  inside,  as 
it  is  called,  the  printer  buys  stereotyped  selections 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  29 

of  other  agencies,  which  offer  him  almost  as  wide 
a  range  of  matter  as  the  exchange  newspapers 
he  used  to  choose  from.  The  few  columns  left 
for  local  gossip  and  general  news,  and  for  what- 
ever editorial  comment  he  cares  to  make  on 
passing  events,  can  be  easily  filled  up  by  two 
compositors.  But  in  my  time  we  had  three 
journeymen  at  work  and  two  or  three  girl- 
compositors,  and  commonly  a  boy-apprentice 
besides.  The  paper  was  richer  in  a  personal 
quality,  and  the  printing-office  was  unquestion- 
ably more  of  a  school.  After  we  began  to  take 
girl-apprentices  it  became  coeducative,  as  far  as 
they  cared  to  profit  by  it;  but  I  think  it  did  not 
serve  to  widen  their  thoughts  or  quicken  their 
wits  as  it  did  those  of  the  men.  They  looked 
to  their  craft  as  a  living,  not  as  a  life,  and  they 
had  no  pride  in  it.  They  did  not  learn  the  whole 
trade,  as  the  journeymen  had  done,  and  served 
only  such  apprenticeship  as  fitted  them  to  set 
type.  They  were  then  paid  by  the  thousand 
ems,  and  their  earnings  were  usually  as  great  at 
the  end  of  a  month  as  at  the  end  of  a  year.  But 
the  boy  who  came  up  from  his  father's  farm, 
with  the  wish  to  be  a  printer  because  Franklin 
had  been  one,  and  with  the  intent  of  making  the 
office  his  university,  began  by  sweeping  it  out, 


30  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

by  hewing  wood  and  carrying  water  for  it.  He 
became  a  roller-boy,  and  served  long  behind  the 
press  before  he  was  promoted  to  the  case,  where 
he  learned  slowly  and  painfully  to  set  type.  His 
wage  was  forty  dollars  a  year  and  two  suits  of 
clothes,  for  three  years,  when  his  apprenticeship 
ended,  and  his  wander-years  (too  often  literally) 
began.  He  was  glad  of  being  inky  and  stained 
with  the  marks  of  his  trade;  he  wore  a  four- 
cornered  paper  cap,  in  the  earlier  stages  of  his 
service,  and  even  an  apron.  When  he  became  a 
journeyman,  he  clothed  himself  in  black  doeskin 
and  broadcloth,  and  put  on  a  silk  hat  and  the 
thinnest-soled  fine  boots  that  could  be  found, 
and  comported  himself  as  much  like  a  man  of  the 
world  as  he  knew  how  to  do.  His  work  brought 
him  acquainted  with  a  vast  variety  of  interests, 
and  kept  his  mind  as  well  as  hands  employed; 
he  could  not  help  thinking  about  them,  and  he  did 
not  fail  to  talk  about  them.  His  comments  had 
generally  a  slightly  acid  flavor,  and  his  constant 
survey  of  the  world,  in  the  "map  of  busy  life" 
always  under  his  eye,  bred  in  him  the  contempt 
of  familiarity.  He  was  none  the  less  agreeable 
for  that,  and  the  jokes  that  flew  about  from 
case  to  case  in  our  office  were  something  the 
editor  would  have  been  the  last  man  to  interfere 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  3l 

with.  He  read  or  wrote  on  through  them  all, 
and  now  and  then  turned  from  his  papers  to  join 
in  them. 

VI 

THE  journeyman  of  that  time  and  place  was 
much  better  than  the  printer  whom  we  had 
known  earlier  and  in  a  more  lax  civilization, 
who  was  too  apt  to  be  sober  only  when  he  had 
not  the  means  to  be  otherwise,  and  who  arrived 
out  of  the  unknown  with  nothing  in  his  pocket, 
and  departed  into  it  with  only  money  enough  to 
carry  him  to  the  next  printing-office.  If  we  had 
no  work  for  him  it  was  the  custom  to  take  up  a 
collection  in  the  office,  and  he  accepted  it  as  a 
usage  of  the  craft,  without  loss  of  self-respect. 
It  could  happen  that  his  often  infirmity  would 
overtake  him  before  he  got  out  of  town,  but  in 
this  case  he  did  not  return  for  a  second  collection; 
I  suppose  that  would  not  have  been  good  form. 
Now  and  then  a  printer  of  this  earlier  sort  ap- 
peared among  us  for  a  little  time,  but  the  ah*  of 
the  Western  Reserve  was  somehow  unfriendly 
to  him,  and  he  soon  left  us  for  the  kindlier  clime 
of  the  Ohio  River,  or  for  the  more  southerly 
region  which  we  were  ourselves  sometimes  so 
homesick  for,  and  which  his  soft,  rolling  accent 


32  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

so  pleasantly  reminded  us  of.  Still,  there  was 
something  about  the  business  —  perhaps  the 
arsenic  in  the  type-metal  —  which  everywhere 
affected  the  morals  as  it  was  said  sometimes  to 
affect  the  nerves. 

There  was  one  of  our  printers  who  was  a  capital 
compositor,  a  most  engaging  companion,  and  of 
unimpeachable  Western  Reserve  lineage,  who 
would  work  along  in  apparent  perpetuity  on 
the  line  of  duty,  and  then  suddenly  deflect  from 
it.  If  he  wanted  a  day  off,  or  several  days,  he 
would  take  the  time,  without  notice,  and  with  a 
princely  indifference  to  any  exigency  we  might 
be  in.  He  came  back  when  he  chose  and  of- 
fered to  go  to  work  again,  and  I  do  not 
remember  that  he  was  ever  refused.  He  was 
never  in  drink;  his  behavior  was  the  effect 
of  some  obscure  principle  of  conduct,  unless  it 
was  that  moral  contagion  from  the  material  he 
wrought  in. 

I  do  not  know  that  he  was  any  more  charac- 
teristic, though,  than  another  printer  of  ours, 
who  was  dear  to  my  soul  from  the  quaintness  of 
his  humor  and  his  love  of  literature.  I  think  he 
was,  upon  the  whole,  the  most  original  spirit  I 
have  known,  and  it  was  not  the  least  part  of  his 
originality  that  he  was  then  aiming  to  become  a 


THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER  33 

professor  in  some  college,  and  was  diligently 
training  himself  for  the  calling  in  all  the  leisure 
he  could  get  from  his  work.  The  usual  thing 
would  have  been  to  read  law  and  crowd  forward 
in  political  life,  but  my  friend  despised  this  com- 
mon ideal.  We  were  both  studying  Lathi,  he 
quite  by  himself,  as  he  studied  Greek  and  Ger- 
man, and  I  with  such  help  as  I  could  find  hi  re- 
citing to  a  kindly  old  minister,  who  had  forgotten 
most  of  his  own  Latin,  and  whom  I  do  not  now 
wish  to  blame  for  falling  asleep  over  the  lessons 
in  my  presence;  I  did  not  know  them  well  enough 
to  keep  him  up  to  the  work.  My  friend  and  I 
read  the  language,  he  more  and  I  less,  and  we 
tried  to  speak  it  together,  to  give  ourselves  con- 
sequence, and  to  have  the  pleasure  of  saying 
before  some  people's  faces  what  we  should  other- 
wise have  said  behind  their  backs;  I  should  not 
now  undertake  to  speak  Lathi  to  achieve  either 
of  these  aims.  Besides  this,  we  read  a  great 
deal  together,  mainly  Shakespeare  and  Cer- 
vantes. I  had  a  task  of  a  certain  number  of 
thousand  ems  a  day,  and  when  I  had  finished  that 
I  was  free  to  do  what  I  liked;  he  would  stop 
work  at  the  same  time,  and  then  we  would  take 
our  Don  Quixote  into  some  clean,  sweet  beech- 
woods  there  were  near  the  village,  and  laugh 


34  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

our  hearts  out  over  it.  I  can  see  my  friend's 
strange  face  now,  very  regular,  very  fine,  and 
smooth  as  a  girl's,  with  quaint  blue  eyes,  shut 
long,  long  ago,  to  this  dolce  lome;  and  some  day 
I  should  like  to  tell  all  about  him;  but  this  is 
not  the  place.  When  the  war  broke  out  he 
left  the  position  he  had  got  by  that  time  in  some 
college  or  academy  farther  west  and  went  into 
the  army.  One  morning,  in  Louisiana,  he  was 
killed  by  a  guerilla  who  got  a  shot  at  him  when 
he  was  a  little  way  from  his  company,  and  who 
was  probably  proud  of  picking  off  the  Yankee 
captain.  But  as  yet  such  a  fate  was  unimagi- 
nable. He  was  the  first  friend  of  my  youth; 
he  was  older  than  I  by  five  or  six  years;  but  we 
met  in  an  equality  of  ambition  and  purpose, 
though  he  was  rather  more  inclined  to  the 
severity  of  the  scholar's  ideal,  and  I  hoped  to 
slip  through  somehow  with  a  mere  literary  use 
of  my  learning. 

VII 

As  I  have  tried  to  say,  the  printers  of  that 
day  had  nearly  all  some  affinity  with  literature, 
if  not  some  love  of  it;  it  was  in  a  sort  always  at 
their  fingers-ends,  and  they  must  have  got  some 
touch  of  it  whether  they  would  or  not.  They 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  35 

thought  their  trade  a  poor  one  moneywise,  but 
they  were  fond  of  it  and  they  did  not  often  for- 
sake it.  Their  hope  was  somehow  to  get  hold 
of  a  country  paper  and  become  editors  and  pub- 
lishers; and  my  friend  and  I,  when  he  was  twenty- 
four  and  I  eighteen,  once  crossed  over  into  Penn- 
sylvania, where  we  had  heard  there  was  a  paper 
for  sale;  but  we  had  not  the  courage  to  offer 
even  promises  to  pay  for  it.  The  craft  had  a 
repute  for  insolvency  which  it  merited,  and  it 
was  at  odds  with  the  community  at  large  by  reason 
of  something  not  immediately  intelligible  in  it, 
or  at  least  not  classifiable.  I  remember  that 
when  I  began  to  write  a  certain  story  of  mine,  I 
told  Mark  Twain,  who  was  once  a  printer,  that 
I  was  going  to  make  the  hero  a  printer,  and  he 
said:  "Better  not.  People  will  not  understand 
him.  Printing  is  something  ever  village  has  in 
it,  but  it  is  always  a  sort  of  mystery,  and  the 
reader  does  not  like  to  be  perplexed  by  something 
that  he  thinks  he  knows  about."  This  seemed 
very  acute  and  just,  though  I  made  my  hero  a 
printer  all  the  same,  and  I  offer  it  to  the  public 
as  a  light  on  the  anomalous  relation  the'  country 
printer  bears  to  his  fellow-citizens.  They  see 
him  following  his  strange  calling  among  them, 
but  to  neither  wealth  nor  worship,  and  they 


36  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

cannot  understand  why  he  does  not  take  up  some- 
thing else,  something  respectable  and  remunera- 
tive; they  feel  that  there  must  be  something 
weak,  something  wrong  in  a  man  who  is  willing 
to  wear  his  life  out  in  a  vocation  which  keeps  him 
poor  and  dependent  on  the  favor  they  grudge 
him.  It  is  like  the  relation  which  all  the  arts 
bear  to  the  world,  and  which  is  peculiarly  thank- 
less in  a  purely  commercial  civilization  like  ours; 
though  I  cannot  pretend  that  printing  is  an  art 
in  the  highest  sense.  I  have  heard  old  journey- 
men claim  that  it  was  a  profession  and  ought  to 
rank  with  the  learned  professions,  but  I  am  afraid 
that  was  from  too  fond  a  pride  in  it.  It  is  in  one 
sort  a  handicraft,  like  any  other,  like  carpenter- 
ing or  stone-cutting;  but  it  has  its  artistic  delight, 
as  every  handicraft  has.  There  is  the  ideal  in 
all  work;  and  I  have  had  moments  of  unsurpassed 
gladness  in  feeling  that  I  had  come  very  near 
the  ideal  in  what  I  had  done  in  my  trade. 
This  joy  is  the  right  of  every  worker,  and  in  so 
far  as  modern  methods  have  taken  it  from  him 
they  have  wronged  him.  I  can  understand 
Ruskin  in  his  wish  to  restore  it  to  some  of 
the  handicrafts  which  have  lost  it  in  the  "base 
mechanical"  operations  of  the  great  manufac- 
tories, where  men  spend  their  lives  in  mak- 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  87 

ing  one  thing,  or  a  part  of  a  thing,  and  cannot 
follow  their  work  constructively.  If  that  were 
to  be  the  end,  the  operative  would  forever  lose 
the  delight  in  work  which  is  the  best  thing  in 
the  world.  But  I  hope  this  is  not  to  be  the  end, 
and  that  when  people  like  again  to  make  things 
for  use  and  not  merely  for  profit  the  workman 
will  have  again  the  reward  that  is  more  than 
wages. 

I  know  that  in  the  old-fashioned  country 
printing-office  we  had  this,  and  we  enjoyed  our 
trade  as  the  decorative  art  it  also  is.  Questions 
of  taste  constantly  arose  in  the  arrangement  of  a 
title-page,  the  display  of  a  placard  or  a  hand- 
bill, the  use  of  this  type  or  that.  They  did  not 
go  far,  these  questions,  but  they  employed  the 
critical  faculty  and  the  aesthetic  instinct,  and 
they  allied  us,  however  slightly  and  unconsciously, 
with  the  creators  of  the  beautiful. 

But  now,  it  must  be  confessed,  printing  has 
shared  the  fate  of  all  other  handicrafts.  Thanks 
to  united  labor,  it  is  better  paid  in  each  of  its 
subdivisions  than  it  once  was  as  a  whole.  In  my 
time,  the  hire  of  a  first-rate  country  printer,  who 
usually  worked  by  the  week,  was  a  dollar  a  day; 
but  of  course  this  was  not  so  little  in  1862  as  it 
would  be  hi  1892.  My  childish  remembrance 


38  THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER 

is  of  the  journeymen  working  two  hours  after 
supper,  every  night,  so  as  to  make  out  a  day  of 
twelve  hours;  but  at  the  time  I  write  of  the  day 
of  ten  hours  was  the  law  and  the  rule,  and  no- 
body worked  longer,  except  when  the  Presi- 
dent's Message  was  to  be  put  in  type,  or  on 
some  other  august  occasion. 

The  pay  is  not  only  increased  in  proportion  to 
the  cost  of  living,  but  it  is  really  greater,  and  the 
conditions  are  all  very  much  better.  But  I 
believe  no  apprentice  now  learns  the  whole  trade, 
and  each  of  our  printers,  forty  years  ago,  would 
have  known  how  to  do  everything  in  the  kind  of 
office  he  hoped  to  own.  He  would  have  had  to 
make  a  good  many  things  which  the  printer  now 
buys,  and  first  among  them  the  rollers  which 
are  used  for  inking  the  type  on  the  press.  These 
were  of  a  composition  of  glue  and  molasses,  and 
were  of  an  india-rubbery  elasticity  and  consist- 
ency, as  long  as  they  were  in  good  condition. 
But  with  use  and  time  they  became  hard,  the 
ink  smeared  on  them,  and  they  failed  to  impart 
evenly  to  the  type;  they  had  to  be  thrown  away 
or  melted  over  again.  This  was  done  on  the 
office  stove,  in  a  large  bucket  which  they  were 
cut  up  into,  with  fresh  glue  and  molasses  added. 
It  seems  in  the  retrospect  to  have  been  rather  a 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  89 

simple  affair,  and  I  do  not  now  see  why  casting 
a  roller  should  have  involved  so  much  absolute 
failure  and  rarely  have  given  a  satisfactory  result. 
The  mould  was  a  large  copper  cylinder,  and  the 
wooden  core  of  the  roller  was  fixed  in  place  by  an 
iron  cap  and  foot-piece.  The  mixture  boiled 
away,  as  it  now  seems  to  me,  for  days,  and  far 
into  the  sleepy  nights,  when  as  a  child  I  was 
proud  of  sitting  up  with  it  very  late.  Then  at 
some  weird  hour  my  father  or  my  brother  poured 
it  into  the  mould,  and  we  went  home  and  left 
the  rest  with  fate.  The  next  morning  the  whole 
office  crowded  round  to  see  the  roller  drawn  from 
the  mould,  and  it  usually  came  out  with  such 
long  hollows  and  gaps  in  its  sides  that  it  had  to 
be  cut  up  at  once  and  melted  over  again.  At 
present,  all  rollers  are  bought  somewhere  in  New 
York  or  Chicago,  I  believe,  and  a  printer  would 
no  more  think  of  making  a  roller  than  of  making 
any  other  part  of  his  press.  "And  you  know," 
said  my  brother,  who  told  me  of  this  change,  "we 
don't  wet  the  paper  now."  "Good  Heavens," 
said  I,  "you  don't  print  it  dry!"  "Yes,  and  it 
doesn't  blur  any  more  than  if  it  were  wet."  I 
suppose  wetting  the  paper  was  a  usage  that  ante- 
dated the  invention  of  movable  type.  It  used 
to  be  drawn,  quire  by  quire,  through  a  vat  of 


o  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

clear  water,  and  then  the  night  before  publication 
day  it  was  turned  and  sprinkled.  Now  it  was 
printed  dry,  I  felt  as  if  it  were  time  to  class  Ben- 
jamin Franklin  with  the  sun-myths. 


VIII 

PUBLICATION  day  was  always  a  time  of 
great  excitement.  We  were  busy  all  the  morn- 
ing getting  the  last  editorials  and  the  latest  news 
in  type,  and  when  the  paper  went  to  press  in  the 
afternoon  the  entire  force  was  drafted  to  the  work 
of  helping  the  engine  and  the  press  through  their 
various  disabilities  and  reluctances.  Several 
hands  were  needed  to  run  the  press,  even  when  it 
was  in  a  willing  frame;  others  folded  the  papers 
as  they  came  from  it;  as  many  more  were  called 
from  their  wonted  work  to  address  them  to  the 
subscribers,  for  with  the  well-known  fickleness  of 
their  sex,  the  young  ladies  of  the  village  ceased 
to  do  this  as  soon  as  the  novelty  of  the  affair 
wore  off.  Still,  the  office  was  always  rather  a 
lively  scene,  for  the  paper  was  not  delivered  at 
the  village  houses,  and  each  subscriber  came  and 
got  his  copy;  the  villagers  began  to  come  about 
the  hour  we  went  to  press,  the  neighboring 
farmers  called  next  day  and  throughout  the  week. 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  4* 

Nearly  everybody  who  witnessed  the  throes  of 
our  machinery  had  advice  or  sympathy  to  offer, 
and  in  a  place  where  many  people  were  of  a 
mechanical  turn  the  spectacular  failure  of  the 
editor's  additions  and  improvements  was  naturally 
a  source  of  public  entertainment;  perhaps  others 
got  as  much  pleasure  out  of  his  inventions  as 
he  did. 

Of  course,  about  election-time  the  excitement 
was  intensified;  we  had  no  railroad  or  tele- 
graphic communication  with  the  outer  world, 
but  it  was  felt  that  we  somehow  had  the  news, 
and  it  was  known  that  we  had  the  latest  papers 
from  Cleveland,  and  that  our  sheet  would  report 
the  intelligence  from  them.  After  all,  however, 
there  was  nothing  very  burning  or  seething  in 
the  eagerness  of  our  subscribers.  They  could 
wait;  their  knowledge  of  the  event  would  not 
change  it,  or  add  or  take  away  one  vote  either 
way.  I  dare  say  it  is  not  so  very  different  now, 
when  the  railroad  and  the  telegraph  have  made 
the  little  place  simultaneous  with  New  York  and 
London.  We  people  who  fret  our  lives  out  hi 
cities  do  not  know  how  tranquil  life  in  the  country 
still  is.  We  talk  of  the  whirl  and  rush,  as  if  it 
went  on  everywhere,  but  if  you  will  leave  the 
express  train  anywhere  and  pass  five  miles  into 


42  THE     COUNTRY    PRINTER 

the  country,  away  from  the  great  through  lines, 
you  will  not  find  the  whirl  and  rush.  People 
sometimes  go  mad  there  from  the  dulness  and 
ennui,  as  in  the  cities  they  sometimes  go  mad 
from  the  stress  and  the  struggle;  and  the  problem 
of  equalizing  conditions  has  no  phase  more  inter- 
esting than  that  of  getting  the  good  of  the  city 
and  the  country  out  of  the  one  into  the  other. 
The  old-fashioned  country  newspaper  formed 
almost  the  sole  intellectual  experience  of  the 
remote  and  quiet  folks  who  dwelt  in  their  lonely 
farmsteads  on  the  borders  of  the  woods,  with 
few  neighbors  and  infrequent  visits  to  the  town- 
ship centre,  where  the  church,  a  store  or  two, 
and  a  tavern  constituted  a  village.  They  got  it 
out  of  the  post-office  there  once  a  week,  and  read 
it  in  the  scanty  leisure  left  them  by  their  farm- 
work  or  then*  household  drudgery,  and  I  dare  say 
they  found  it  interesting.  There  were  some  men 
in  every  neighborhood,  tongueyer  than  the  rest, 
who,  when  they  called  on  us,  seemed  to  have  got 
it  by  heart,  and  who  were  ready  to  defend  or 
combat  its  positions  with  all  comers;  this  sort 
usually  took  some  other  paper,  too  —  an  agri- 
cultural paper,  or  the  New  York  Trybune,  as 
they  called  it,  or  a  weekly  edition  of  a  Cleveland 
journal.  It  was  generally  believed  that  Horace 


THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER  43 

Greeley  wrote  everything  in  the  Trybune,  and 
when  a  country  subscriber  unfolded  his  Trybune 
he  said,  with  comfortable  expectation,  "Well, 
let's  see  what  old  Horace  says  this  week."  But 
by  far  the  greater  number  of  our  subscribers  took 
no  paper  but  our  own.  I  do  not  know  whether 
there  is  much  more  reading  done  now  on  the 
farms,  but  I  doubt  it.  In  the  villages,  however, 
the  circulation  of  the  nearest  city  dailies  is  pretty 
general,  and  there  is  a  large  sale  of  the  Sunday 
editions.  I  am  not  sure  that  this  is  an  advantage, 
but  in  the  undeniable  decay  of  interest  in  the 
local  preaching,  some  sort  of  mental  relish  for 
the  only  day  of  leisure  is  necessary.  It  is  not  so 
much  a  pity  that  they  read  the  Sunday  papers, 
as  that  the  Sunday  papers  are  so  bad.  If  they 
were  carefully  and  conscientiously  made  up, 
they  would  be  of  great  use;  they  wait  their 
reformer,  and  they  do  not  seem  impatient  for 
him. 

In  the  old  time,  we  printers  were  rather  more 
in  touch  with  the  world  outside  on  the  journalistic 
lines  than  most  of  our  fellow-villagers,  but  other- 
wise we  were  as  remote  as  any  of  them,  and  the 
weekly  issue  of  the  paper  had  not  often  anything 
tumultuously  exciting  for  us.  The  greatest 
event  of  our  year  was  the  publication  of  the 


44  THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

President's  Message,  which  was  a  thrill  in  my 
childish  life  long  before  I  had  any  conception  of 
its  meaning.  I  fancy  that  the  patent  inside, 
now  so  universally  used  by  the  country  papers, 
originated  in  the  custom  which  the  printers 
within  easy  reach  of  a  large  city  had  of  supply- 
ing themselves  with  an  edition  of  the  President's 
Message,  to  be  folded  into  their  own  sheet,  when 
they  did  not  print  their  outside  on  the  back  of  it. 
There  was  always  a  hot  rivalry  between  the  local 
papers  in  getting  out  the  message,  whether  it 
was  bought  ready  printed,  or  whether  it  was 
set  up  in  the  office  and  printed  in  the  body  of 
the  paper.  We  had  no  local  rival,  but  all  the 
same  we  made  haste  when  it  was  a  question  of 
the  message.  The  printers  filled  their  cases 
with  type,  ready  for  the  early  copy  of  the  mes- 
sage, which  the  editor  used  every  device  to 
secure;  when  it  was  once  in  hand  they  worked 
day  and  night  till  it  was  all  up,  and  then  the 
paper  was  put  to  press  at  once,  without  regard 
to  the  usual  publication  day;  and  the  com- 
munity was  as  nearly  electrified  as  could  be  with 
our  journalistic  enterprise,  which  was  more  im- 
portant in  our  eyes  than  the  matters  the  message 
treated  of. 
There  is  no  longer  the  eager  popular  expecta- 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER  45 

tion  of  the  President's  Message  that  there  once 
seemed  to  be;  and  I  think  it  is  something  of  a 
loss,  that  ebb  of  the  high  tide  of  political  feeling 
which  began  with  the  era  of  our  immense  material 
prosperity.  It  was  a  feeling  that  formed  a  sol- 
idarity of  all  the  citizens,  and  if  it  was  not  always, 
or  often,  the  highest  interest  which  can  unite 
men,  it  was  at  least  not  that  deadly  and  selfish 
cult  of  business  which  centres  each  of  us  in  his 
own  affairs  and  kills  even  our  curiosity  about 
others.  Very  likely  people  were  less  bent  on  the 
pursuit  of  wealth  in  those  days,  because  there 
was  less  chance  to  grow  rich,  but  the  fact  remains 
that  they  were  less  bent  in  that  direction,  and 
that  they  gave  then-  minds  to  other  things  more 
than  they  do  now.  I  think  those  other  things 
were  larger  things,  and  that  our  civic  type  was 
once  nobler  than  it  is.  It  was  before  the  period 
of  corruption,  when  it  was  not  yet  fully  known 
that  dollars  can  do  the  work  of  votes,  when  the 
votes  as  yet  rather  outnumbered  the  dollars,  and 
more  of  us  had  the  one  than  the  other.  The 
great  statesman,  not  the  great  millionaire,  was 
then  the  American  ideal,  and  all  about  in  the 
villages  and  on  the  farms  the  people  were  eager 
to  know  what  the  President  had  said  to  Congress. 
They  are  not  eager  to  know  now,  and  that  seems 


46  THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER 

rather  a  pity.  Is  it  because  in  the  war  which 
destroyed  slavery,  the  American  Democracy 
died,  and  by  operation  of  the  same  fatal  anomaly 
the  American  Plutocracy,  which  Lincoln  fore- 
boded, was  born;  and  the  people  instinctively 
feel  that  they  have  no  longer  the  old  interest  in 
President  or  Congress? 

There  are  those  that  say  so,  and,  whether  they 
are  right  or  not,  it  is  certain  that  into  the  great 
centres  where  money  is  heaped  up  the  life  of  the 
country  is  drained,  and  the  country  press  has 
suffered  with  the  other  local  interests.  The 
railroads  penetrate  everywhere,  and  carry  the 
city  papers  seven  times  a  week,  where  the  home 
paper  pays  its  tardy  visit  once,  with  a  patent 
inside  imported  from  the  nearest  money  centre, 
and  its  few  columns  of  neighborhood  gossip, 
too  inconsiderable  to  be  gathered  up  by  the  corre- 
spondents of  the  invasive  dailies.  Other  causes 
have  worked  against  the  country  press.  In 
counties  where  there  were  once  two  or  three 
papers  there  are  now  eight  or  ten,  without  a 
material  increase  of  population  to  draw  upon 
for  support.  The  county  printing,  which  the 
paper  of  the  dominant  party  could  reckon  upon, 
is  now  shared  with  other  papers  of  the  same 
politics,  and  the  amateur  printing-offices  be- 


THE      COUNTRY      PRINTER  fa] 

longing  to  ingenious  boys  in  every  neighborhood 
get  much  of  the  small  job-work  which  once  came 
to  the  publisher. 

It  is  useless  to  quarrel  with  the  course  of  events, 
for  which  no  one  is  more  to  blame  than  another, 
though  human  nature  loves  a  scape-goat,  and 
from  time  to  time  we  load  up  some  individual 
with  the  common  sins  and  drive  him  into  a  wilder- 
ness where  he  seems  rather  to  enjoy  himself  than 
otherwise.  I  suppose  that  even  if  the  conditions 
had  continued  favorable,  the  country  press  could 
never  have  become  the  influence  which  our  editor 
fondly  hoped  and  earnestly  strove  to  make  it. 
Like  all  of  us  who  work  at  all,  the  country  printer 
had  to  work  too  hard;  and  he  had  little  time  to 
think  or  to  tell  how  to  make  life  better  and  truer 
in  any  sort.  His  paper  had  once  perhaps  as 
much  influence  as  the  country  pulpit;  its  support 
was  certainly  of  the  same  scanty  and  reluctant 
sort,  and  it  was  without  consecration  by  an 
avowed  self-devotion.  He  was  concerned  with 
the  main  chance  first,  and  after  that  there  was 
often  no  other  chance,  or  he  lost  sight  of  it.  I 
should  not  instance  him  as  an  exemplary  man, 
and  I  should  be  very  far  from  idealizing  him; 
I  should  not  like  even  to  undertake  the  task  of 
idealizing  a  city  journalist;  and  yet,  in  the  retro- 


48  THE     COUNTRY     PRINTER 

spect  at  least,  the  country  printer  has  his  pathos 
for  me  —  the  pathos  of  a  man  who  began  to 
follow  a  thankless  calling  because  he  loved  it, 
and  kept  on  at  it  because  he  loved  it,  or  else 
because  its  service  had  warped  and  cramped  him 
out  of  form  to  follow  any  other. 


ARRANGED   AND  PRINTED  BY 

THE   PLIMPTON   PRESS 

NORWOOD 

MASS 

U'S 

A 


BOOKS  BY  WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS 


ANNIE    KILBURN. 

APRIL   HOPES. 

BETWEEN   THE  DARK  AND 

DAYLIGHT. 
BOY    LIFE. 

BOY'S  TOWN. 

CERTAIN  DELIGHTFUL  ENGLISH 

TOWNS. 

CHRISTMAS    EVERY    DAY,    AND 
OTHER  STORIES. 

COAST    OF   BOHEMIA. 

CRITICISM    AND    FICTION. 

DAY  OF  THEIR  WEDDING. 

FAMILIAR   SPANISH   TRAVELS. 

FENNEL   AND   RUE. 

FLIGHT  OF  PONY  BAKER. 

HAZARD    OF   NEW   FORTUNES. 

HEROINES    OF    FICTION. 

IMAGINARY    INTERVIEWS. 

IMPERATIVE   DUTY. 

IMPRESSIONS      AND      EXPERI- 
ENCES. 

KENTONS. 

LANDLORD  AT  LION'S  HEAD. 

LETTERS   HOME. 

LITERARY    FRIENDS    AND 
ACQUAINTANCE. 

LITERATURE  AND  LIFE. 
LITTLE  SWISS  SOJOURN. 
LONDON  FILMS. 

MISS  BELLARD'S  INSPIRATION. 
MODERN  ITALIAN  POETS. 
MOTHER  AND  THE  FATHER. 
MOUSE-TRAP,     A     LIKELY 

STORY,       THE       GARROTERS, 

FIVE-O'CLOCK  TEA. 
MY  LITERARY  PASSIONS. 


MY   MARK    TWAIN. 

MY  YEAR  IN  A  LOG  CABIN. 

OPEN-EYED    CONSPIRACY. 

PAIR  OF  PATIENT  LOVERS. 

PARTING    AND   A   MEETING. 

QUALITY    OF    MERCY. 

QUESTIONABLE    SHAPES. 

RAGGED   LADY. 

ROMAN   HOLIDAYS. 

SEVEN    ENGLISH    CITIES. 

SHADOW    OF   A    DREAM. 

SON  OF  ROYAL  LANGBRITH. 

STOPS  OF  VARIOUS  QUILLS. 

STORY    OF   A    PLAY. 

THE       DAUGHTER       OF       THE 

STORAGE. 
THE     SEEN     AND     UNSEEN     AT 

STRATFORD-ON-AVON . 
THEIR      SILVER      WEDDING 

JOURNEY. 
THROUGH      THE      EYE      OF      A 

NEEDLE. 

TRAVELLER  FROM  ALTRURIA. 
WORLD   OF   CHANCE. 
YEARS   OF  MY   YOUTH. 

Farces 

A    LETTER    OF    INTRODUCTION. 
A   LIKELY   STORY. 

A  PREVIOUS  ENGAGEMENT. 
EVENING  DRESS. 
FIVE-O'CLOCK  TEA. 
PARTING  FRIENDS. 

THE   ALBANY    DEPOT. 

THE   GARROTERS. 

THE    MOUSE-TRAP. 

THE  UNEXPECTED  GUESTS. 


HARPER  &  BROTHERS,   PUBLISHERS,   NEW  YORK 


CG 


